Football and Early Pay-Per-View Television

Week 16 of the 2023 NFL season included the first exclusive streaming of the Sunday night game on Peacock. Showing NFL games exclusively on a channel not contained in the standard cable package is a sign of the future and the past. Maybe.

For most of football's history, the primary revenue source was the gate or ticket revenues from those sitting in the seats at the game. The problem with that model was that the combination of ticket prices and the number of seats in the stadium capped revenues. When radio first came along, colleges commonly banned the broadcasting of games due to concern that people would stay home to listen to the game rather than spend the time and money to attend in person. They soon relented, and radio broadcasts became a fixture of the sports world.

The same occurred with television until the revenues grew large enough to outweigh potential losses at the gate. Given this concern, the NFL teams blacked out games in the local market, even sold-out games. The blackout meant that television stations could not show an NFL game if the station's signal came within 75 miles of the stadium hosting the game. The blackouts boosted revenues of hotels and bars situated 75 miles from the stadium as hometown fans without tickets to big games drove to those locations to watch games on television. (The first seven Super Bowls were blacked out in the host cities despite local teams not playing in the games.)

Another technology many thought might overtake broadcast television was pay per view (PPV). Rather than having companies pay the networks to broadcast games in exchange for inserting commercials into the broadcasts, consumers could pay to watch games at home, in a local theater, or at a large conference center. Thomas F. O'Neill, president of RKO Teleradio Pictures, argued in 1957 that PPV was coming for significant events like the World Series. Referencing people paying $3 to $7.50 to watch a recent championship fight shown in movie theaters, O'Neill argued:

...if the same championship fight had been telecast into home TV sets for a fee, it's probable it would have sold for one dollar per set, or at the very most, $2. And there would have been no limit to the number of folks who could crowd into a living room to take advantage of the $1 or $2 admission.

'O'Brian, Jack, Pay TV Favored By Major Broadcaster,' Muncie Evening Press, November 16, 1957.